IBM

Look for more staff cuts at IBM – especially in hardware – after the company’s quarterly earnings fell below analysts’ estimates. Big Blue reported fourth-quarter revenue of $27.7 billion, while Wall Street had expected the number to be more like $28.25 billion. Though revenues were slightly off at the technology services and business services groups, IBM’s hardware business dropped 3.5 percentage points to 35.6 percent, continuing the decline of the unit. Now word’s come that the company’s worked a deal… continue…

Watson, the IBM supercomputer that won $1 million playing Jeopardy in 2011, is now becoming available to app developers. The system that was built for Jeopardy was not your everyday PC. With 2,880 cores and 16 TB of RAM running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, it cost roughly $3 million. Its processing speed can read a million books a second, approximately 500 GB of data. On the day of the TV show, it had 200 million pages of structured and… continue…

IBM is partnering with colleges and universities to prepare workers for the jobs it needs filled, especially in areas like cybersecurity and Big Data. The company provides technology and materials to the schools, and students come out trained and comfortable with its tools. Another eleven schools recently joined Big Blue’s Cyber Security Innovation Program: Fordham University, Georgia Institute of Technology, San Jose State University, Southern Methodist University, Technische Universitat Darmstadt in Germany, Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore, Universidad Cenfotec in Costa… continue…

IBM has opened a design studio in Austin and plans to add hundreds of jobs over the next five years. The company’s General Manager of Design Phil Gilbert called the studio “a broad ambitious new approach to re-imagining how we design our products and solutions.” He said the goal is to “modernize enterprise software for today’s users, who demand great design everywhere, at home and at work.” For years, workers used to consumer products at home have wondered why their… continue…